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Earlier Newsletters

Drone Strikes or Shared Security?: Join Me
June 16 for a Conversation

President
Obama envisions a world in which armed drone strikes and U.S. military training in other
countries become the preferred role for military force in U.S.
foreign policy. But what are the consequences of this approach, which
the president outlined in his speech at West Point
last week?

FCNL's
Associate Director of Legislative Affairs Michael Shank is recently
returned from Yemen,
where he saw first-hand the results of U.S.
drone strikes and the missed opportunities for a more effective U.S.
foreign policy.Please join
Michael and me on a special telephone briefing for FCNL supporters onMonday,
June 16 at 8 p.m.Eastern.

Michael
and I will also talk about current legislative efforts to promote our
shared security as a nation and a world—by repealing the 2001
Authorization for the Use of Military Force, addressing the role of
water scarcity in fueling conflict and more. We’ll also answer your
questions and talk about ways you can be active with FCNL on issues you
care about.

The wreckage of a car destroyed by a US drone strike in Azan, Yemen,
February 2013. (Photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters/Corbis)On Monday,The
New York Timesreportedthat “the Senate has quietly stripped
a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama
to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted
killing operations in Pakistan
and other countries where the United
States uses lethal force.” National security
officials in the Obama administration objected strongly to having to notify the
public of the results and scope of their dirty work, and the Senate acceded. So
much for what President Obama hascalled“the most transparent administration
in history.”

The
Senate’s decision is particularly troubling in view of how reticent the
administration itself continues to be about the drone program. To date, Obama
has publicly admitted to the deaths of only four people in targeted killing
operations. That came in May 2013, when, in conjunction with aspeechat the NationalDefenseUniversity,
and, in his words, “to facilitate transparency and debate on the issue,”
President Obama acknowledged for the first time that the United States had killed four
Americans in drone strikes. But according tocredible accounts,
Obama has overseen the killing of severalthousandpeople
in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to the four Americans’
deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we
kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?

In the
NDU speech, President Obama also announced new limits on the use of drones
“beyond the Afghan theater.” He proclaimed that drone strikes would be
authorized away from the battlefield only when necessary to respond to
“continuing and imminent threats” posed by people who cannot be captured or
otherwise countermanded. Most important, he said, “before any strike is taken,
there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the
highest standard we can set.” Yet in December, a US
drone strike in Yemen
reportedly struck a wedding party.The New York Timesreportedthat while some of the victims may
have been linked to al-Qaeda, the strike killed “at least a half dozen innocent
people, according to a number of tribal leaders and witnesses.”

The decision to drop the requirement to report
on the number of people we kill in drone strikes fittingly if depressingly came
on the ten-year anniversary of CBS’s airing of the photos of torture and
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. To this day, the United States has not held accountable any
senior official for torture inflicted during the “war on terror”—not at Abu
Ghraib, not at Guantanamo,
not at Bagram Air Force Base, and not in the CIA’s secret prisons, or “black
sites.” President Obama has stuck to his commitment to look forward, not
backward, and his administration has opposed all efforts to hold the
perpetrators of these abuses to account. Indeed, the administration has
classified even the memories of the survivors of torture in CIA black sites,
now housed at Guantanamo,
maintaining that they and their lawyers cannot under any circumstance even talk
publically about their mistreatment.

To be
fair, Obama deserves some credit for both banning torture and achieving some
transparency on the subject. In one of his first acts as president, he formally
prohibited the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that his predecessor had
approved—and that Bush and Cheney both proudly proclaim in their memoirs they
would approve all over again. Shortly thereafter, Obama declassified the
chilling secret memoranda, drafted by various Justice Department lawyers in the
Bush Administration, that were designed to give legal cover to the CIA’s
torture program. And most recently, in March, Obamasaidthat he thinks that the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligencereporton the CIA’s interrogation program,
the only comprehensive review based on access to classified information to date
of the agency’s treatment of prisoners, should be declassified and released to
the public. (The committee has voted to declassify and release a six
hundred-page executive summary from the 6,300 page report, and it is now up to
the president to live up to his statement and declassify it.)

But it’s one thing to demand transparency for
a predecessor’s wrongs. It’s another to support it in regard to one’s own
dubious actions. In the past, some have argued that the United States cannot be transparent about
targeted killings in countries like Pakistan
and Yemen
because their governments approved of our use of lethal force within their
borders on the condition that we not admit that we were doing so. The morality
of such an agreement is itself deeply questionable; presumably the plausible
deniability is demanded because no government could openly admit to its people
that it had given another sovereign the green light to kill by remote control
inside its own borders. But the deniability is no longer plausible.

As
long ago as September, 2012, the Yemeni President Abed Raboo Mansour Hadi
disclosed that hesigned offon every US drone strike in Yemen, and
in April 2013, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf similarlyadmittedthat his government had agreed to
targeted killings in Pakistan. Following the strike on the Yemeni wedding party
last December, the government there conceded that civilians were killed,
provided reparations to the survivors, and suspended permission to the United States
to conduct further drone strikes until the incident was investigated. But the US has
not even publicly acknowledged its own involvement—namely, as the killer.

International law acknowledges that killing is
not always illegal or wrong, and that a government has the authority to do so
as a last resort in genuine self-defense. But if the US government’s targeted killings
are lawful, we should have no hesitation in making them public. Surely the
least we can do is to literally count and report the lives we’ve taken. Yet even
that, for “the most transparent administration in history,” is apparently too
much.

Spring Days of Action to End Drone Killing, Drone Surveillance
and Global Militarization

Global Network [globalnet@mindspring.com]

Thursday, January 30, 2014 12:20 PM

CALL FOR SPRING DAYS OF ACTION – 2014

Today we issue an
international call forSpring
Days of Action – 2014,a
coordinated campaign in April and May to:

End Drone Killing, Drone Surveillance
and Global Militarization

The campaign will focus on
drone bases, drone research facilities and test sites and drone manufacturers.

The campaign will provide
information on:

1. The suffering of tens
of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza who
are under drone attack, documenting the killing, the wounding and the
devastating impact of constant drone surveillance on community life.

2. How attack and
surveillance drones have become a key element in a massive wave of
surveillance, clandestine military attacks and militarization generated by the
United States to protect a global system of manufacture and oil and mineral
exploitation that is creating unemployment and poverty, accelerating the waste
of nonrenewable resources and contributing to environmental destruction and
global warming.

In addition to cases in
the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, we will examine President Obama's
"pivot" into the Asia-Pacific, where the United
States has already sold and deployed drones in the
vanguard of a shift of 60% of its military forces to try to control China
and to enforce the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership. We will show, among
other things, how this surge of "pivot" forces, greatly enabled by
drones, and supported by the US military-industrial complex, will hit every
American community with even deeper cuts in the already fragile social programs
on which people rely for survival. In short, we will connect drones and
militarization with "austerity" in America.

3. How drone attacks have
effectively destroyed international and domestic legal protection of the rights
to life, privacy, freedom of assembly and free speech and have opened the way
for new levels of surveillance and repression around the world, and how, in the
United States, increasing drone surveillance, added to surveillance by the
National Security Agency and police, provides a new weapon to repress black,
Hispanic, immigrant and low-income communities and to intimidate Americans who
are increasingly unsettled by lack of jobs, economic inequality, corporate
control of politics and the prospect of endless war.

We will discuss how the United States government and corporations
conspire secretly to monitor US citizens and particularly how the
Administration is accelerating drone surveillance operations and surveillance
inside the United States
with the same disregard for transparency and law that it applies to other
countries, all with the cooperation of the Congress.

The campaign will
encourage activists around the world to win passage of local laws that prohibit
weaponized drones and drone surveillance from being used in their communities
as well as seeking national laws to bar the use of weaponized drones and drone
surveillance.

The campaign will draw
attention to the call for a ban on weaponized drones by RootsAction.org that
has generated a petition with over 80,000 signers

Sign-On Info:Until
we have installed a program that will enable people to post their endorsements,
please ask people to send them to me at my email:nickmottern@earthlink.net I will update
the list daily; it should be only a few days until the endorsement link is
installed, and I will send full details.

·Heather
Linebaugh's personal account of her work on the US drone program gives one set
of reasons for why that program should be stopped immediately. Another
reason was given by the Prime Minister of Pakistan two days ago: the use of
drones in Pakistan
violates the national sovereignty of that country and is protested by
almost everyone there who learn to hate Americans for doing this to their
country. A third reason: unless drones are banned by an international
treaty with the same seriousness that chemical warfare was banned, we
may live to see the day when powers hostile to the U.S. launch drones that
kill or main you, your neighbors, your children, your friends. It could
happen here--and sophisticated drones could be much harder to head off than
other forms of attack. And the source of drone attacks may be hard to
identify as drones start to become an accepted weapon by many countries,
including small dictatorships that will eventually be ovethrown (some by
people who wish to strike back at the US for supporting their repressive
governments, as for example Egyptian Muslims watching as the US refuses to
call the recent coup a coup so that we can still fund the military
dictatorship which is every day proclaiming some new assault on freedm and
democracy of the Egyptian people).

·

·
Stopping Drone Warfare is just one of the
campaigns sponsored by Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
But we are one voice that is not just AGAINST!!!Unlike many voices in the
progressive world that know what they are against but rarely put forward
what they are for, we have a positive vision, spelled out in Rabbi Lerner's
booksSprit Matters,The Politics of Meaning,
andThe Left Hand of God,
and summarized in our Spiritual Covenant with America (read that atwww.spiritualprogressives.org).

·

·
And like dozens of other non-profits, we are
asking you to donate to make a tax-deductible contribution to Tikkun and/or
our education and communal arm The Network of Spiritual Progressives. You
can do so by mailing a check to Tikkun at 2342 Shattuck Ave, #1200, Berkeley,
Ca. 94704 OR by donating on line atwww.tikkun.org/nextgen/donate

Jan 31, 2014 -Today we issue an
international call forSpring Days of
Action– 2014, ... How attack and surveillancedroneshave become a key
element in a ..... They allknowthat earth's food
and water sources are wholly contaminated.

Whenever I
read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Predator and Reaper program – aka drones –
I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: "How many
women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?"
And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make
it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed
legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen
die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because
our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle] were unable to detect
an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?"

Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the
benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the
other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

I knew the names of some of the young soldiers I saw bleed
to death on the side of a road. I watched dozens of military-aged males die
in Afghanistan,
in empty fields, along riversides, and some right outside the compound
where their family was waiting for them to return home from mosque.

What the public needs to understand is that the video
provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone
carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and
perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to
identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind:
"The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a
weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV
analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered
the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because
of a bad image or angle.

It's also important for the public to grasp that there are
human beings operating and analysing intelligence these UAVs. I know
because I was one of them, and nothing can prepare you for an almost daily
routine of flying combat aerial surveillance missions over a war zone. UAV
proponents claim that troops who do this kind of work are not affected by
observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.

But here's the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan,
but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on
end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying
barely covers it. And when you are exposed to it over and over again it
becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat,
causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully
never experience. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories
of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being
a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or
identification of hostile individuals were.

Of course, we are trained to not experience these feelings,
and we fight it, and become bitter. Some troops seek help in mental health
clinics provided by the military, but we are limited on who we can talk to
and where, because of the secrecy of our missions. I find it interesting
that the suicide statistics in this career field aren't reported, nor are
the data on how many troops working in UAV positions are heavily medicated
for depression, sleep disorders and anxiety.

Recently, the
Guardian ran a commentary by Britain's secretary of state for defence Philip Hammond. I wish I
could talk to him about the two friends and colleagues I lost, within one
year leaving the military, to suicide. I am sure he has not been notified
of that little bit of the secret UAV program, or he would surely take a
closer look at the full scope of the program before defending it again.

The UAV's in the Middle East
are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains
ignorant to this, this serious thr

REMINDER: Tell the President to end
'Double Tap' drone strikes

Here is a new Progressive Secretary letter. You will be able to edit your
name, address, etc. in the next step.

This letter supports an
action by Watchdog.net asking the President to stop "double-tap"
drone strikes. "Double-tap" means that after attacking the main
targets, we attack again, mostly killing innocents that try to clear
bodies.

Our letter will be sent to President Obama.

Mr.
President, do you want to be remembered for war crimes?

U.S.
drone strikes are employing a sick strategy called “double-tap,” in which a
target is bombed multiple times in relatively quick succession. As a
result, civilians coming to aid those bombed in the first strike are killed
or wounded in the second.

The tactic has caused such fear that rescuers often wait hours before
approaching the scene of an attack, leaving the injured to suffer and die.

Ban the practice of double-tap drone strikes. They are war crimes. They
cause unnecessary bloodshed and death. You are better than this, Mr.
President. We are better than this.

Amy Goodman, Video Interview, NationofChange, June 2, 2014:According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed people in Yemen, Somalia,
Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Richard Clarke
served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of
the Iraq War has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting
of the Drone.” Democracy Now talks to Clarke about the book and his
concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war.

In November 2001, when the CIA assassinated al-Qaeda
commander Mohammed Atef with a killer drone in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, the U.S.
held a virtual monopoly on the technology of lethal robots. Today, more than70
countriesin the
world deploy drones, 16 of them the deadly variety, and many of those
drones target rural people living on the margins of the modern world.

Armed drones have been hailed as a technological
breakthrough in the fight against terrorists who, in the words of President
Obama, “take refuge in remote tribal regions…hide in caves and walled
compounds…train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.” But much of the butcher’s bill for the
drones has fallen on people who live in those deserts and mountains, many
of whom are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time or get swept into a
definition of “terrorist” so broad it that embraces virtually all adult
males.

Since 2004—the
year the “drone war” began in earnest—missile-firing robots have killed
somewhere between 3,741 and 5,825 people in Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia,
and injured another 1,371 to 1,836. The London-basedBureau of Investigative Journalismestimates that this death toll
includes between 460 to 1,067 “civilians” and as many as 214 children.

But, because how the U.S. defines “civilian” is
classified, it is almost impossible to determine exactly who the victims
are. Up until recently, it appears that being between the ages of 18 and 60
while carrying a weapon or attending a funeral for a drone victim was
sufficient to get you incinerated.

In his May address to the NationalDefenseUniversity, however, President Obama claimed to have
narrowed the circumstances under which deadly force can be used.
Rather than the impossibly broad rationale of “self-defense,” future
attacks would be restricted to individuals who pose a “continuing and
imminent threat to the American people” and who could not be “feasibly
apprehended.” The President added that there had to be a “near certainty
that no civilians would be killed or injured.”

As national security expert and constitutional law
professorDavid Colepoints out, the new criteria
certainly are a more “demanding standard,” but one that will be extremely
difficult to evaluate since the definition of everything from “threat” to
“civilian” is classified. Over the past year there has been a drop in the
number of drone strikes, which could reflect the new standards or be a
response to growing anger at the use of the robots. Some97 percentof Pakistanis are opposed to the
use of drone strikes in that country’s northwest border region.

The drones that roam at will in the skies over Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia are going global, and the terror and death they sow in
those three countries now threatens to replicate itself in western China,
Eastern Turkey and northern Iraq, highland Peru, South Asia, and the Amazon
basin.

Drones have become a multi-billion dollar industry, and
countries across the planet are building and buying them. Many are used for
surveillance, but the U.S.,
Britain, Sweden, Iran,
Russia, China, Lebanon,
Taiwan, Italy, Israel,
France, Germany, India,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all own
the more lethal varieties. The world’s biggest drone maker is Israel.

For a sure-fire killer you want a
Made-in-the-USA-by-General-Atomics Predator or Reaper, but there are other
dangerous drones out there and they are expanding at a geometric pace.

Iran
recently unveiled a missile-firing“Fotros”robot to join its “Shahad 129”
armed drone. China
claims its“Sharp
Sword”drone has
stealth capacity. A Russian combat drone is coming off the drawing boards
next year. And a European consortium of France,
Italy, Spain, Sweden,
Greece and Switzerland
is developing the armed Dassault nEURon drone. Between 2005 and 2011, the
number of drone programs worldwide jumped from 195 to 680. In 2001, the U.S.
had 50 drones. Today it has more than 7,500.

While drone promoters claim that robot warfare is the
future, they rarely mention who are the drones’ most likely targets. Except
for surveillance purposes, drones are not very useful on a modern
battlefield, because they are too slow. Their advantage is that they can
stay aloft for a very long time—24 to 40 hours is not at all unusual—and
their cameras give commanders a real-time picture of what is going on. But
as the Iranians recently demonstrated by downing a U.S. RQ-170 stealth
drone, they are vulnerable to even middle-level anti-craft systems.

“Predators and Reapers are useless in a contested
environment,” saysU.S.
Gen. Mike Hostage, chief of Air Combat Command. “I couldn’t [put
one] into the Strait of Hormuz without
putting airplanes there to protect it.”

But over the tribal areas of Pakistan,
the rural villages of Yemen
and the coast of Somalia
they are virtually invulnerable. Flying at an altitude beyond the range of
small arms fire—which, in any case, is highly inaccurate—they strike without
warning. Since the drone’s weapon of choice, the Hellfire missile, is
supersonic, there is no sound before an explosion: a village compound, a
car, a gathering, simply vanishes in a fury cloud of high explosives.

Besides dealing out death, the drones terrify. Forensic
psychologistPeter
Schaapveld found that drones inflicted widespread posttraumatic
stress syndrome in Yemeni villagers exposed to them. Kat Craig of the
British organization Reprieve, who accompanied Schaapveld, says the terror
of the drones “amounts to psychological torture and collective punishment.”

But do they work? They have certainly killed leading
figures in al Qaeda, the Haqqani Group, and the Taliban, but it is an open
question whether this makes a difference in the fight against terrorism.
Indeed, a number of analysts argue that the drones end up acting as recruiting
sergeants by attacking societies where honor and revenge are powerful
currents.

In his book “The
Thistle and the Drone: How America’s
war on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam,” anthropologistAkbar Ahmedargues that the drone war’s major
victims are not ideologically committed terrorists, but tribal people. And
further, that when a drone sows death and injury among these people, their
response is to seek retribution and a remedy for dishonor.

For people living on the margins of the modern world,
honor and revenge are anything but atavistic throwbacks to a previous era.
They are cultural rules that help moderate inter-community violence in the
absence of centralized authority and a way to short circuit feuds and war.

Kinship systems can function similarly, and, in the case
of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
the drone war ends up creating a broader base for groups like the Taliban. The
major target of drones in those countries is the Pashtun tribe, which makes
up a plurality of Afghanistan
and a majority in Pakistan’s
tribal areas. From the outside, Pashtun clans are a factious lot until they
encounter an outsider. Then the tribe’s segmentary lineage system kicks in
and fulfills the old Pashtun adage: “Me against my brother; my brother and
me against our cousins; my brother, me and our cousins against everyone
else.”

Occupying someone else’s lands is dangerous and expensive,
hence the siren lure of drones as a risk-free and cheap way to intimidate
the locals and get them to hand over their land or resources. Will the next
targets be indigenous people resisting the exploitation of their lands by
oil and gas companies, soybean growers, or logging interests?

The fight against “terrorism” may be the rationale for
using drones, but the targets are more likely to be Baluchs in northwest Pakistan, Uyghurs in Western China, Berbers
in North Africa, and insurgents in Nigeria. Some 14 countries in
Latin America are purchasing drones or setting up their own programs, but
with the exception of Brazil,
those countries have established no guidelines for how they will be used.

The explosion of drone weapons, and the secrecy that
shields their use was the spur behind theGlobal
Drone Summitin
Washington, titled “Drones Around the Globe: Proliferation and Resistance”
and organized by Codepink, the Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation
Magazine, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers
Guild. The Nov. 16 meeting drew anti-drone activists from around the world
to map out plans to challenge the secrecy and the spread of drones.

Zeus gave Pandora a box, and her husband, Epimetheus, the
key, instructing them not to open it. But Pandora could not resist
exploring what was inside, and thus released fear, envy, hate, disease and
war on the world. The box of armed drones, but its furies are not yet fully
deployed. There is still time to close it and ban a weapon of war aimed
primarily at the powerless and the peripheral.

Tom Engelhardt, Washington's Wedding Album From HellTomDispatch , RSN, Dec. 28, 2013Engelhardt
writes: "The headline - 'Bride and Boom!' - was spectacular, if you
think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you
have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous
exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of
the Murdoch-owned New York Post."READ MORE

A tribesman near a building damaged
by a US drone strike that
targeted suspected al-Qaeda militants last year, Azan, Yemen,
February 2013

Tolstoy’s novellaHadji
Muradopens with the image of a beautiful thistle
flower, wrenched from a ditch, that the narrator seeks to add to his bouquet.
His effort to pluck it, however, proved a very difficult task. Not only did the
stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my
hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five
minutes, breaking the fibres one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the
stalk was all frayed, and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and
beautiful…. But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended
itself, and how dearly it sold its life!

This late masterpiece, written in 1904 but never published in
Tolstoy’s lifetime, was based on a real-life episode. In 1851 the Avar warlord
Hajimurad al-Khunzaki, a confederate of the Imam Shamil, who led the resistance
to Russia’s annexation of
the Caucasus, betrayed his ally and went over
to the Russians. In Tolstoy’s story he is driven by ambition, hoping to govern
the Caucasian tribes under the “white tsar.”

The most telling portrayals in the story—apart from Hadji Murad
himself, with his thistle-like mix of bravery, integrity, cunning, confusion,
and childlike candor—are the complementary, almost symmetrical descriptions of
Tsar Nicholas I and the Imam Shamil, both of whom are depicted as cold-eyed,
ruthless autocrats who represent opposing forces of absolutism. As Tolstoy
himself explained:

It is not only Haji Murad and his
tragic end that interest me. I am fascinated by the parallel between the two
main figures pitted against each other: Shamil and Nicholas I. They represent
the two poles of absolutism—Asiatic and European.

The reality, however, was a great deal more complicated than a
clash of absolutisms. Far from being the cold and ruthless autocrat depicted by
Tolstoy, Shamil, as themurshid,
or spiritual guide, of the orthodox Muslim Khalidiyya-Naqshbandiyya order, was
a leader who sustained the loyalty of the warring Caucasian tribes by diplomacy
rather than force. A Russian source described him as “a man of great tact and a
subtle politician.” His charismatic appeal was underpinned by his reputation
for piety and evenhandedness in dispensing justice in accordance with Islamic
sharia norms. These had been severely tested when the Russians introduced
alcohol into the region, corrupting, by sharia standards, the tribal chiefs who
became their clients.

As a renowned warlord and tribal leader, Hadji Murad had been a
Russian loyalist, defending Avaristan in the eastern part of Daghestan against
Shamil’s encroachments. It was only after the Russians had replaced him as
their client in Avaristan by a rival who had him arrested and abused that Hadji
Murad responded to Shamil’s overtures and joined the jihad.

The result of his defection in January 1841 had been dramatic:
by April Shamil ruled an area three times as large as at the beginning of 1840,
with a cascade of formerly compliant clans joining the jihad. Hadji Murad’s
rift with Shamil was a classic example of hubris. Hoping to be named his
successor as imam, he refused to recognize the nomination of Shamil’s eldest
son, Ghazi Muhammad. Faced with this challenge to his authority, Shamil
convened a secret council that charged Hadji Murad with treason and sentenced
him to death. Warned by friends, he redefected to the Russians in November 1851.

As an anthropologist with
deep knowledge and direct experience of tribal systems, Akbar Ahmed
demonstrates inThe Thistle and the Dronehow
richly Tolstoy’s thistle metaphor applies to contemporary conditions in
regions, distant from urban centers, where clans resist the writ of government
while also engaging with it. He points to their “love of freedom” to act
without external constraints, as well as egalitarianism, [and] a tribal lineage
system defined by common ancestors and clans, a martial tradition, and a highly
developed code of honor and revenge—these are the thistle-like characteristics
of the tribal societies…. Moreover, as with the thistle, there is a clear
correlation between their prickliness, or toughness, and the level of force
used by those who wish to subdue these societies, as the Americans discovered
after 9/11.

Ahmed is especially troubled by the
use of drones against Muslim tribal groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and
Somalia, but his analysis of the nature of the state and its relation with
tribal peoples has application far beyond the condition of Muslim tribal
societies. As he sees it, the use of unmanned aircraft as a leading
counterinsurgency weapon has morphed into a campaign against tribal peoples
generally, with the US
president disposing of “Zeus-like power to hurl thunderbolts from the sky and
obliterate anyone with impunity.”

Flying at 50,000 feet above ground,
and therefore out of sight of its intended victims, the drone could hover
overhead unblinkingly for twenty-four hours, with little escaping its scrutiny
before it struck. For a Muslim tribesman, this manner of combat not only was
dishonorable but also smacked of sacrilege. By appropriating the powers of God
through the drone, in its capacity to see and not be seen and deliver death
without warning, trial, or judgment, Americans were by definition blasphemous.

The Zeus-like power, he writes, is
especially damaging to children. A Pakistani observer notes that drones circling the skies in
Waziristan on Pakistan’s
notoriously lawless northwest frontier “produce a monotonous buzz, almost like
the sound of a generator,” making it difficult for young children to sleep.
Jennifer Gibson, who contributed to a report jointly commissioned by the
Stanford and New YorkUniversity law schools,
goes further: “Drones terrorize the civilian population. They subject whole
communities to the constant threat of random annihilation.” The use of drone
strikes peaked in 2010, and although the number of strikes on Pakistan has fallen each year since
then, it is estimated that between 88 and 143 people there have been killed by
drones this year.

Discussions about the use of drones, in the US as in Europe,
have tended to focus on questions of legality and constitutionality. Their
wider strategic purpose in fighting America’s enemies may be taken as a
given. Scott Shane, ofThe New
York Times, has questioned the sincerity ofCIAdirector
John Brennan’s denial that the administration prefers targeted killings to the
messy business of trying to arrest suspected terrorists, which involves issues
of extradition, American troops on foreign soil, and cumbersome legal
processes. Shane writes:

Since Mr. Obama took office, theCIAand
military have killed about 3,000 people in counterterrorist strikes in Pakistan, Yemen
and Somalia,
mostly using drones. Only a handful have been caught and brought to this
country; an unknown number have been imprisoned by other countries with
intelligence and other support from the United States.

Citing counterterrorism specialists inside and outside of
government, Shane suggested that the policy of assassination or “targeted
killings” has been shaped by, among other things, the decreasing urgency of
interrogation as a mode of gaining intelligence “at a time when the terrorist
threat has diminished and the United
States has deep intelligence on its
enemies.”

The claim of “deep intelligence” is questionable. As Kenneth
Roth has argued in these pages,1the Obama administration may have
“dispensed with its predecessor’s language of the ‘global war on terror’” but
its basic approach is similar; and in his book Ahmed suggests that the “deep
intelligence” claimed for the US
is profoundly inadequate, not to say deeply flawed.

The fundamental error, according to Ahmed, is that US
leaders believe they are facing a threat from enemies whose motivation is
primarily ideological. This was clearly stated by President Obama in his speech
at the NationalDefenseUniversity last May, when he said that
most, though not all, of the terrorism faced by America

is fueled by a common ideology—a
belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and
the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is
justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a
lie, for the United States
is not at war with Islam. And this ideology is rejected by the vast majority of
Muslims, who are the most frequent victims of terrorist attacks.

Although al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations had suffered
setbacks, said Obama, the ideology persisted, motivated by “the evil that lies
in the hearts of some human beings.” The primary task facing the United States
must be to defeat the threat by winning “a battle of wills, a battle of ideas.”
Since it was not possible for America
to deploy a team of Special Forces to capture every terrorist, it sometimes had
to take “lethal, targeted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces,
including with remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones.”

In a striking reference to the terrain where the terrorists
operated, the president stated:

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates try to
gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth.
They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled
compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.

The Thistle and the Drone—published some time before Obama’s speech—makes a
clear argument that the president and his advisers are putting the al-Qaeda
cart before the tribal horse. This impression is reinforced by the recent
events in Yemen, where an alleged plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) led to the closure of US
embassies throughout the Middle East and North Africa—a move that seemed to
contradict Obama’s claim that Americans were safer as a result of his efforts.
Rather than exploiting the denizens of “remote tribal regions” as Obama’s
speech proclaimed, the terrorist activities associated with al-Qaeda and its
affiliates are actively engaging the responses of tribal peoples (the thistles
of Tolstoy’s metaphor) whose cultures are facing destruction from the forces of
modern society—including national governments—currently led by the United States.

Ahmed’s book is a radical analysis based on extensive
anthropological detail too complex to be easily summarized. A good example of
his approach, however, is his analysis of the background of the September 11
hijackers. It is well known that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists were Saudi
nationals. Less well known or indeed understood is their tribal background. The
official report of the 9/11 Commission, based on information provided by the
Saudi authorities, states that four of the thirteen “muscle hijackers”—the
operatives whose job was to storm the cockpits and control the passengers—came
from the al-Bahah region, “an isolated and undeveloped area of Saudi Arabia,
and shared the same tribal affiliation.” Three of them shared the same
al-Ghamdi surname; five others came from AsirProvince, described as a poor, “weakly
policed area” that borders Yemen,
with two of these, Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, actually brothers.

Apart from the brief reference to “tribal affiliation,” the
September 11 report skates over the fact that all of these “muscle hijackers”
hailed from the contiguous regions of al-Bahah and Asir or from the Wadi
Hadhramaut in southern Yemen where Osama bin Laden’s own family came from.
Drawing on politically loaded information provided by Saudi intelligence and
the waterboarding inflicted on two al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
and the would-be hijacker Ramzi Binalshibh, the report focuses mainly on
personal contacts, training, and ideological influences. It goes so far as to
state that “ethnicity generally was not a factor in the selection of operatives
unless it was important for security or operational reasons.”

ROBERT GREENWALD’S FILM, UNMANNED

Here is the website for Robert Greenwald's Drone documentary
"Unmanned:
America's Drone Wars."

Medea Benjamin, Op-Ed,
NationofChange, May 16, 2014:If you think that as a U.S.
citizen you’re entitled to a trial by jury before the government can decide
to kill you—you’re wrong. During his stint as a lawyer at the Department of
Justice, David Barron was able to
manipulate constitutional law so as to legally justify killing American
citizens with drone strikes. If you’re wondering what the justification for
that is, that’s just too bad—he legal memos are classified. What’s suspicious is that now the Obama
Administration wants to appoint the lawyer who wrote that legal memos to
become a high-ranking judge for life.

Write or Call the White House

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